


New Orleans, 2263

by traveller



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-12
Updated: 2009-08-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:14:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/traveller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>Things were a little better and everybody had food to eat and a place to stay but it was still New Orleans, <em>à jamais</em>.</cite></p>
            </blockquote>





	New Orleans, 2263

**Author's Note:**

> according to some book canon, Christine Chapel is from New Orleans. a meditation.

They fixed the levees but that made the swampland erode faster; Louisiana was shrinking, sinking, until somebody got the idea to apply the new terraforming technology to terra instead of luna. The weather net allowed for summer's thunderstorms but kept the hurricanes at bay; the street cars hovered and whispered instead of rattled and screeched. At night the sky over New Orleans was still violet, the sidewalks were still terrible, and the sweet smells of flowers and decay still hung in the air.

There was always going to be crime where people were poor, and even the great strides of two centuries of social reform could not keep pace with human nature. The drugs were different, the weapons were different, the colors of the faces more varied, but the emergency clinics still overflowed on Fridays, Saturdays, and nights that the moon was full. They closed down the parish prison at last in favor of fines and community service; things were a little better and everybody had food to eat and a place to stay but it was still New Orleans, _à jamais_.

Christine's mawmaw lived to be one hundred and twenty-two, and _her_ father, who had spelled the family name _Chappelle_ , had claimed to remember the Great Storm. It was an exaggeration, of course; the stories were more likely from his own grandparents, but the stories were there, the proof, such as it was, that the family had been in the city since before the Storm shook up the population like a pair of dice in hand, firing it down the felt toward who knew what destination.

Five years in space, with only the occasional shore leave on planets that so often only resembled Earth in their atmospheric makeup, with only two leaves on Earth itself, and then with no time to go home. San Francisco was a beautiful city, but it was cold despite the sun, and the air was full of salt. Here the wind was green, like that old Spanish poem, and warm on your face, like arms around you in the night.

She took a taxi from the airport as far Carrolton and Claiborne, then took the St. Charles streetcar through the falling light, her cheek against the dirty window. Here, a store that she didn't remember, there, a house a different color, it felt all at once that everything had changed, that she had been gone too long. Then the breeze blew in the open windows, the smell of camellia, jasmine and rose, and she watched a man in a crisp seersucker suit bend down to pick up his terrier, tucking it under one arm to cross the street.

Christine got out at Sixth Street and walked down to the house on Prytania, hers now that both her parents had passed. They did not lie in the crumbling white crypts across the road, people weren't buried anymore, it was a waste of land, but in the morning Christine would cut flowers from the garden and cross the street anyway. The dead did not trouble her, these ghosts she had grown up with, tall and pale as they were themselves.

The house smelled comfortingly of mildew and floor polish; Starfleet provided everything that anyone else would use a salary for, so she had continued to employ her parents' housekeeper, knowing then at least that the place would be clean and tidy should she ever return. It was exactly as she had left it, exactly as she had recalled it, a throw draped over the couch in the parlor as if her mother had risen and left the room only a moment before.

In the morning she would call McCoy, and invite him to stay a few days. He had, by some strange set of circumstances, never been to New Orleans, and they had spoken of it a few times. He'd never be so crass as to actually hint at wanting an invitation, but the desire had always been there. She would call, and she would tell him that it was a good time to visit.

Outside the wind rustled the oaks; a warm rain began to fall.


End file.
